Engineers in the service of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who gave his name to what we now call “China,” built an artificial island in 256 BCE to divide the Ming River near the city of Chengdu, and cut a 66-meter channel through Mount Yulei using heated stones and cold water to crack the living rock. In place of deadly floods, the spring runoff of the Ming River irrigated 2,000 square miles of farmland, turning the Sichuan desert into the breadbasket of China. The Dujiangyan flood control and irrigation system was one of Qins three great water projects, along with the Shengguo Canal in Shaanxi Province and the Lingqu Canal in Guangxi Province.

　　Dujiangyan, which still irrigates the Sichuan plain today, is inundated with Chinese schoolchildren visiting this wonder of the ancient world, now a United Nations heritage site. The irrigation ditches of the Mesopotamians are scratches in the sand next to this colossus. By the time Qins engineer Li Bing designed it, China already had 3,000 years of experience in large-scale water management. Chinese archaeologists in 2017 announced the discovery of “large-scale and formalized water management, in the case of the Liangzhu culture of the Yangtze Delta, dated at 5,300–4,300 years BCE. The Liangzhu culture represented a peak of early cultural and social development predating the historically recorded Chinese dynasties.”

　　Westerners think of a nation in organic terms: Nations begin with a common language, culture, and religion. They coalesce from tribes and clans, and then decide what sort of state they will have and what those states will do. The reverse has been true in China since its earliest beginnings, shrouded in legend and unearthed by archaeologists: The Chinese state created China, not vice versa. The core of the country is the enormous flood plain defined by the 8,000 miles of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. Taming the floods and irrigating the fields made it possible for successive Chinese dynasties to assimilate peoples who still speak 200 dialects today out of six major language groups. This is not a new or original assertion: Karl Wittvogel’s 1957 book Oriental Despotism, among others, presented a similar thesis.

　　Barbarians have conquered and ruled China several times, most recently in the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) founded by Manchu invaders from the north, but the new rulers found that China could be ruled only in the way it had been ruled for millennia past. The same principle applies to the Communist dynasty—an imperial system without a hereditary emperor—that rules China today.

　　Americans imagine that inside every Chinese person an American is struggling to get out. But China is different, so different that the categories of Western political science are meaningless. China will not change because we think it should, or because we want it to, or because we exhort the Chinese to embrace the benefits of democracy and free markets. If it changes, it will do so very slowly. We shall have to deal with China as it is, and has been for thousands of years. We can demonstrate the superiority of our system with economic growth, technological innovation, and military strength—although we haven’t done so of late. We can show that our ways our better—when we stick to our ways—and set an example. But we can’t change China by preaching to the Chinese.

　　China’s unique geographic conditions required from antiquity a centralized tax system to fund infrastructure and a centralized bureaucracy to administer it. It never persuaded the peoples it absorbed into the Chinese empire to speak a common language or to confess the same religion. Ethnicity has no role in Chinese statehood.

　　The foundation of Western statehood is civil society, an English term that obscures the German original: Bürgerliche Gesellschaft, that is, a society of citizens. The nations of Europe formed amid the ruins of the Roman Empire under the tutelage of the Roman Catholic Church, united by common language and religion. These nations might or might not have built infrastructure—European agriculture thrived on small-scale technologies like the water wheel, the windmill, the iron plough, and the horse collar. The first important European canal project, the 35-mile Briare Canal connecting the Loire and Seine Rivers, wasn’t completed until 1642, two millennia after the Qin Dynasty’s much larger and more complex canal projects. France was France many centuries before it built canals; the Qin Dynasty, by contrast, created China by building canals and irrigation systems.

　　It is not an “organic” nation that arose out of common Sittlichkeit, Hegel’s term for the complex customs and traditions that condition society, but a top-down construct managed by an imperial bureaucracy and tax system. Despite the valiant efforts of Sun Yat-Sen, the founder of 1912 Republic of China, the Chinese remain imperial subjects rather than citizens. Sticking with infrastructure, the geography of China meant that flood control could not be undertaken locally. It required the full resources of an empire across the 8,000 miles of the Yellow and Yangtse Rivers, not counting tributaries. That was China’s equivalent of Manifest Destiny.

　　How did ancient China compare to the Roman Empire? Rome required 200,000 new slaves a year to replace the ones who were worked to death on the latifundia that supported its armies and its urban proletariat. It fell because small numbers of barbarian invaders elicited rebellion by the slaves who made up two-fifths of the population of the Italian peninsula. Slavery was uncommon in ancient China, although serfdom was prevalent. Unlike Rome, China did not work to death its manual laborers, however oppressive their conditions of life might have been. Hegel famously quipped that in the East, one person—the emperor—was free; in the ancient Western world, a few, namely the slave owners, were free; and in the Christian West, all were free.

　　Chinese civilization has roots that have endured for thousands of years, and will not change to suit our sensibilities.

　　It is no surprise, then, that China’s hierarchical system never developed a dialectical philosophy comparable to that of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Plato. Orders flowed from the Emperor to the provincial governor, from the governor to the local Mandarin, and from the Mandarin to the head of an extended family working a farm; its political system resembled nested Chinese boxes. The notion of an individual opinion had no practical value: There was no popular assembly, no Senate, no forum in which conflicting views might be debated. Chinese philosophy focuses on acceptance, hierarchical loyalty, or adherence to authority, in its respective guises of Taoism, Confucianism, and Legalism. It instantiates Hegel’s contention that Vernunft (loosely, critical reason) depends on freedom. America’s founders spent generations governing their affairs through church assemblies, town meetings, and provincial legislators before they ventured to create a republic. The Chinese in their 5,000-year history never had such an opportunity.

　　When Chinese dynasties failed, either because of internal corruption or natural disaster, bandit rebellions replaced them. China has no hereditary aristocracy, unlike Europe, because the new dynasty levels the ground that preceded it. The Communist Party of China arose as a bandit rebellion in China’s classic historical pattern, and governs as a new incarnation of China’s ancient Mandarin caste. In place of the old Mandarin exam based on Chinese classics, China now has the gaokao, the fearsome university entrance exam. The biggest difference between today’s Communists and the old Mandarins is that the CCP is larger and more comprehensive, with nearly 100 million members.

　　China’s Emperor is not a revered demigod on the Japanese model, or an anointed sovereign claiming divine right, but simply the one ruler whose job it is to prevent all the other would-be rulers from killing each other. He is Lucky Luciano, the capo di capi whose function is to keep the peace among the underbosses who fear him more than they fear each other. And, to extend the metaphor, the CCP is Marxist in the same way the Mafia is Catholic; both organizations take their ideology seriously, although its practical significance is limited. The Chinese people therefore don’t love their emperor, any more than rank-and-file Mafia soldiers love the capo. They say resignedly, “Without an emperor, we’d kill each other.” And that is just what they have done in the tragic periods when imperial dynasties collapsed. Civil war, foreign invasion, famine, and plague often reduced China’s population by a tenth to a fifth until a new dynasty sorted itself out.

　　Language is another example of how different China is from Western civilization. Not until the present generation has a majority of Chinese understood even the rudiments of a common spoken language. Few Chinese can converse in it. The Chinese government estimated in 2014 that only 70 percent of its people speak basic Mandarin but that only one out of ten Chinese citizens speak it fluently. Six major languages and 280 minor ones are still spoken. Variations among China’s languages aren’t minor. A Mandarin-speaker from Beijing and a Cantonese speaker from Guangzhou won’t understand a word the other is saying. The two languages are as different as French and Finnish. Sixty million people speak Cantonese, about as many as speak Italian. Neither of them will understand much Sichuanese, spoken by 120 million people in China’s southwest. No Chinese mother has ever sung her baby to sleep in “Chinese.” Mandarin is the Beijing court dialect, not a national language that arose from a common culture. In the West, though, nationality is inseparable from language. Dante’s Tuscan language became Italy’s national language, and Luther’s Bible translation created standard German, just as the King James Bible defined modern English. The first nation-state was the kingdom that united the twelve tribes of Israel at the start of the first millennium BC, on the premise that all Hebrew speakers should belong to the same polity. At the time that was an innovation; six hundred years later, Aristotle still argued that the ideal size of a city-state was 1,000 or so households. No Greek thinker until Polybius in the second century BCE proposed that all Greeks should belong to the same polity. Israel became the model for the Western monarchies, which appropriated the idea of kingship by divine right as a foundation for legitimacy.

　　More than anything else, imperial meritocracy holds China together. Not until 212 AD when the Roman Empire had long been in demographic decline, did Emperor Caracalla issue the Antonine Constitution that gave Roman citizenship to all free men in the empire. China, by contrast, built its empire by creating citizens as it expanded. Even more, it created a caste of leaders by offering the most ambitious among its new citizens a path to power and wealth through the imperial examination system. The Taoist and Confucian classic texts comprised the whole of the curriculum for the imperial examinations. This established a unified imperial culture that resisted the centrifugal forces of the ethnically and linguistically disparate provinces. Confucius according to the texts and commentaries that have come down to us taught a sort of virtue ethics that some Chinese scholars have compared to Aristotle. Aristotle, to be sure, was no more successful in teaching moderation to his pupil Alexander the Great than the Confucian texts succeeded in inculcating moderation into Chinese emperors.

　　Ambition is the glue that holds the polyglot, ethnically mixed Chinese empire. Napoleon invented the modern mass citizen army, saying that each of his soldiers kept a field marshals baton in his rucksack. That is, he awoke the ambition of the downtrodden peasants of France and made them into a force that crushed the professional armies of the European monarchs. The Chinese are more practical than the French. Every Chinese person carries flash cards for the Gaokao, China’s formidable university entrance examination taken by 13.4 million Chinese in 2024. The United States has just 3.8 million graduating high school seniors; I doubt that 5 percent of them could pass the Gaokao. China is a ruthless meritocracy. Top officials and billionaires can buy admission to Harvard for their children, but not to Peking University. For well over two thousand years, academic achievement has been the path to success for the Chinese. It should be no surprise that China now graduates more engineers than the rest of the world combined.

　　I do not like this system, and I do not believe that it fosters the kind of disruptive creativity that challenges established modes of thought. Western culture has inherent advantages, or at least used to have such advantages when we still paid homage to the high culture of the West. But Chinese civilization has roots that have endured for thousands of years, and will not change to suit our sensibilities.